Sparta, Interrupted

I've been growing more and more unhappy with everything about my job as time flies on. Eric swung by the other day and asked how much I hated my job. I didn't have a real answer when he asked me, but since then I've thought of the computer AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream when it was asked how much it hates humanity.

"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."

Then I thought of the Total Perspective Vortex from the sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is described thusly. "You can kill a man, destroy his body, break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man's soul!"

So, things could be better at the moment.  I do blog psuedoanonamously here, and we discussed why in the comments briefly, and it's mostly because I bitch about my job so much. It's not hard to figure out who I am based on information that I've let slip, but it would be more difficult to happen upon this blog if you were searching only for my real name.

To return to Eric's visit, we did have a very nice time when he was over. Lily told him "Tiny Titans is my favorite book!"

Lily and Gavin played superheroes (he was Batman, she was Superwoman) and pretended that their superpowers included supercleaning as they dusted around the house with Lily's little toy cleaning supplies. When Gavin started cleaning my face, Eric told him to sweep something else, so I did my best John Kreese impression and said "Sweep the leg, Gavin."

Eric wanted some time to talk like grownups (sort of. We talked about video games and super heroes) so we turned on Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc to distract the kids. It's the new Scooby Doo series, and it's surprisingly good.

The other day, Jen asked me if I were writing anything for Geek Speak this month and I said that I was going to see Sucker Punch.

"Is that a boy movie?" she asked.

I said that it had a lot of girls in it.

"Yes, dear," she replied, "Boy movies often do."

On Tuesday I saw Sucker Punch and it was terrible. Since I do owe Geek Speak a real review and since I dislike duplicating material, I'll just outline things briefly here and relate reactions that will be of interest mainly to people who know me in real life.

The movie was essentially Sparta Interrupted!

Like this, but with icepicks and fishnets

I went there with Frederick and Eric and Ancker. Frederick had won a couple tickets from the local radio station, and he very generously (or so it seemed at the time) invited us to come with him to see it.

We grabbed dinner at the local Chinese buffet and Frederick mentioned previous tickets that he had won last year, but never got to use. That sounded vaguely familiar, and somebody asked him which movie and he replied Jonah Hex. Somebody else was like, "Jonah Hex kinda sucked, didn't it?" and I was as oblivious as the guy in the horror movie when the creepy music starts playing and the camera pans away from him to focus on the spoor of the monster. We were in trouble but we didn't know it.

The previews were the best part of the movie.

First up is Arthur - with Russell Brand  as the titular aardvark  and Jennifer Garner as Skeletor. Also featuring Luiz Guzman as himself. I liked Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but remaking Arthur just seems wrong. What else does Dudley Moore have going for him? Let the guy have his legacy!

Priest - A Vampire movie when it's Ash Wednesday all the time. It did have nice visuals though. The Priest has to leave his walled city to rescue his niece from the vampires.  Her name is Lucy. Of course it is. Something about he trailer reminded me of the cover from Wasteland, which was a piece I really liked.

X-Men: First Class: This looks like it's made entirely out of awesomeness. Nuff said, true believers.

Three Musketeers: I guess we were about due for another go at this. It looks amazingly generic. For the first half of this trailer, I thought they were rerunning the Priest one by mistake.

Fast Five: Who, exactly, was clamoring for this? It's the fifth (!!!) movie in the Fast & the Furious series, whose movies shared little beyond fast cars and the same name, but I have to admire their ambition, because they seemed to bring back everybody who wanted in from the previous installments, so yay for continuity porn. Also, I do like the Rock.

Hangover Part II:  Ayup.

And finally, Captain America! It looks great, but I have some unanswered questions, will Chris Evans will use his flame powers or his skateboarding prowess to defeat the Nazis? Will Hugo Weaving need any makeup to play the Red Skull? How awesome is it that the Howling Commandos are in the movie?!

And then it was time for Sucker Punch.I'm not going to go into great detail, because I owe Geek Speak the full review, and as I said on Facebook, if you hate woman and love lobotomies, this is the movie for you!

Snyder has stated that one interpretation of the film is that it is a critique on geek culture’s sexism and objectification of women.

I think that's bullshit. *coughcoughParodyretconcough*

I'll link to my review when I finish it.

Where the sidewalk ends

Quite a bit happened over this weekend, both good and bad, but before that, giraffes!

My friend Karen reads this blog, but only because I sometimes mention giraffes. So rather than bury the giraffe portion in the middle, I thought I'd just put it right up front so she wouldn't have to search around for it.

I found this website, where a Russian family raises and sells petite lap giraffes. Have you ever seen anything cuter? I'm sure Karen will have some choice words about it, that's for sure.

When we were eating on Saturday, Lily said "I'm concerned about going to church," and I said "You're concerned?", because it was such a strange choice of words for a little kid and she looked at me and said, "I believe you know what concerned means?", which was of course, even stranger.

She went to sleep early on Saturday and woke up in a bad mood on Sunday. The mother of all bad moods. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood. I don't know what set her off.

As she was getting undressed for her bath, she hit me with the dress she had just taken off. I picked her up and told her not to do that, whereupon she blew a raspberry right in my face. I put her on time-out, which upset her even more. And the next hour and a half was pretty bad. Lily was saying, "I don't want a mommy or daddy any more! I don't want to live here!" and stuff like that, on and on.

She eventually calmed down in spite of everything and we took off for church in the nick of time.

We were looking forward to this for a while, because I rarely attend church with Jen and Lily, but I was going this week because Lily would be singing a couple songs as part of their program. It's fairly well known that Unitarian Universalists worship Cthulhu, and I'm somewhat uneasy with that.

Somehow he got left off this list of famous unitarians

(I can hear the complaints now. "I don't really like giraffes!" "We don't worship Cthulhu!")

Lily was pretty cute. Her age level perfomed two songs,  Love Grows in both spoken word and sign language, and a short ditty of the UU Principles set to the tune of one of her favorites, "Do, Re, Mi". ("One: Each person is worthwhile, Two: Be kind in all you do..." etc.)


I'd put a video up here, but blogger degrades the quality of hosted videos so much that it's not worth it. Since people mostly read my Lily posts when they feed into Facebook, I might as well just put the video up there.

We stopped in at a place Jen had read about in a local magazine, Hello Burrito. I liked the food. I loved the fact that the Yelp review to which I linked ranks the restaurant's ambiance as "Hipster".

We weren't done yet, because we took off to a local playground to play around for a while, even though the temps were still in the 30s.  We ran around for a bit until we were able to lure Lily away with promises of a brownie tasting at Terra Cafe. I read about it on a local blog that I happen to enjoy and it was really quite neat. They had live music and brownie samples in all the colors of the rainbow. The hazelnut and sea salt were nifty, but my heart belonged to the caramel bacon brownies.

This is what you eat in heaven. Unless you're a Unitarian. In their heaven, Cthulhu eats YOU!

When it came to buying some to take home, we were considerably more conservative, and got one each of the pineapple and the peanut butter.

As we were walking back to the car at the end of our very busy day, Lily looked at piece of broken sidewalk and very matter-of-factly declared, "Oh. This must be where the sidewalk ends."

I'm pleased we managed to reclaim as much of the day as we did. 

Wow

I feel like this blog has really arrived. I had to delete a spambot post last night.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Naked Matador

When I was a kid, I was huge into mythology, so it's no surprise that I wound up reading as much Zelazny as I have. Of course, when I was a kid, mythology meant Greek mythology, and as I read more Zelazny I was somewhat disappointed that he never really worked more with the Greek myths. (And call me Conrad was one of the very last of his books that I read, and I don't know if young Josh would have appreciated it anyway, seeing to him that Greek myths were epics about Zeus and Athena and Achilles and not stories about some kallikan-something thingy he'd never heard of.)

Which brings us to The Naked Matador. Our narrator remarks on the similarities to Hemingway's The Killers, and if he hadn't, I would have. In the introduction to the piece, Zelazny said he felt like writing a Hemingway piece. I think he succeeded outstandingly.

It's quite a minimalist work, having virtually no plot to speak of.  Descriptions are pared down to the bone. And yet it works. I think it's just shy of brilliant.

The story opens with Nick Adams "Jess Smithson" in a diner, on the run. He takes a seat next to an attractive woman with a scarf over her hair and smoked glasses over her eyes.

We paid our checks. She was short. About five-two or -three. I couldn't really see much of her, except for her legs, and they were good.

We went out and turned left. She headed toward a small white car. I could smell the sea again.

We got in and she began to drive. She didn't ask me where I was staying. She looked at her watch again.

"I'm horny," she said then. "You interested?"

It had been quite a while, running the way I had been. I nodded as she glanced my way.

"Yeah," I said. "You look good to me."

She drove for a time, then turned down a road toward the beach. It was an isolated stretch. The waves were dark and high and white capped.

Whenever I think about Hemingway, I think about something Vonnegut wrote about him somewhere or other, wondering what kind of thesaurus he had, because he always got away with dinky little words that everybody knew, and was yet one of the giants of the 20th Century. I ran Matador through MS Word's readability analysis and it got a Flesch–Kincaid score of the second grade. And yet, it's a great story.

I mentioned in my review of Coils that I associated that book with this story because they both featured houseboats. On rereading, I see that I was mistaken about the houseboat, because there isn't one in the Naked Matador. Don from Coils does mention a condo in Key West, so I think that's why I made the connection between the two stories. (I wish he would have said "cottage" instead of condo, so that way I could pretend that M is renting Don's place while he's away.)

One of my favorite traits of Zelazny's writing is his penchant for omitted scenes, a trick, he says, he stole from Hemingway, where the author omits from the final draft of the story something he knows to be true. I wonder what those papers are in the manila envelope in bottom of the suitcase. I wonder what interest the men in the blue Fury might represent. But they're not important. The papers are the Macguffin and the men in the Fury are the men who want it back. That's all we need for the story.

My favorite part is the phone call from Perseus. I can't remember if that's when I knew for sure that the woman was Medusa, but I think it was.

"Em . . .? Is Em . . . there . . .?" said a man's voice, sounding as through a seashell. "Who is . . . this . . .?"

"Jess," I said, "Smithson. I'm renting this place for a week. It belongs to some lady. I don't know her name."

"Tell her . . . Percy's . . . called."

"I don't know that I'll see her. But is there any message?"

"Just that . . . I'll be . . . coming."

I just love the detail that he sounds like he's speaking through a seashell.

Here's another part I enjoyed:

We went back to the bedroom and I showed my gratitude for as hard and long as I could. It was still a hands-and-mouth-below-the-neck proposition, but we all have our hangups, and it was certainly wild and interesting country. Afterward, she broiled lamb chops and I tossed a salad. Later, we drank coffee and smoked some small black cigars she had. It was dark by then and the rain had stopped.

Heh. I'm glad NESFA collected the stories, because if I had done the project, it would be nothing but me breaking into the text every couple of paragraphs to say "Great line!" or "I love this part!"

Much later that night, Joe and I pushed the two limestone statues over the side into the Gulf Stream. I leaned on the rail for a long while after that, before I realized I had forgotten to tell her that Percy was coming. Later, the sun rose up at my back, turning the sea to a fleece of gold in the west.

Nice reference the Golden Fleece there at the end.

I don't think it's one of Zelazny's all time great short stories like Divine Madness or Comes Now the Power, but it a lot of fun to read, and I imagine that he had a fun time writing it too. The process probably went something like this: I went to my typewriter to write a Hemingway pastiche. I sat down. I wrote it. It was pretty good.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: This Mortal Mountain

Welcome back to Josh's Roger Zelazny commentaries. Today I'm looking at This Mortal Mountain, which I always used to confused with This Moment of the Storm. (And then I used to get This Moment of the Storm confused with The Night has 999 Eyes, because the Hell Cops have those patrol eyes, but now I've finally got everything straightened out.)

It's the story of Mad Jack Summers, and his odyssey to climb the Gray Sister, a forty-mile tall mountain whose peak extends beyond the atmosphere. I consider this story to be in the same class of Zelazny stories as A Rose for Ecclesiastes or The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth  in that they're pretty straight SF stories which remind me of a pulpier era of sci-fi.

I really like the language used in the story.

"How does the Gray Sister strike you?"

And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said, "Like Our Lady of the Abattoir--right between the eyes."

We drank some coffee, and then he asked, "She too big, Whitey?" and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this way, and at the moment I wasn't too certain of whether Henry Lanning qualified for that status--just because he'd known me for twenty years--after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name like LSD pronounced backwards, after George Diesel, who had set foot in the dust and then gone away--smart fellow!

"A forty-mile-high mountain," I finally said, "is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw into orbit."

Later on they establish that Jack climbed Everest at 23. I thought Bear Grylls was the youngest person to climb it, and I knew he had done it at 23, but he wasn't the youngest person to climb it, just the youngest Brit.

 (The youngest person to climb it was 13-year-old Jordan Romero It's kind of funny how time marches on, and a feat that was impressive when the story was published is entirely unremarkable now. (As unremarkable as climbing Mount Everest can be, that is.)

Everest is 29,029 feet, or about five and a half miles. The Gray Sister is more than seven times taller. It's probably not possible to climb a mountain that big with the techniques you'd use on a terrestrial mountain even with Diesel's lesser gravitation.   And I know, it's a picayune complaint, along the lines of dismissing Dracula because you don't believe in vampires (though such a response is perfectly valid when confronted with Twilight, however.) And there's something about the willing suspension of disbelief. It's just a central element of the story and happens to rub me the wrong way. That said,  sometimes the genius is not found in the tale, but within its telling, and that's true for me here.

Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back, all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day.  Ahead of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising and rising and rising.  Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as I walked.  Straight up, though, no stars, just black.  I wondered for the thousandth time what a mountain weighed.  I always wonder that as I approach one.  No clouds in sight.  No noises but my boot sounds on the turf and the small gravel.  My small goggles flopped around my neck.  My hands were moist within my gloves.

For an instant, I was seized by a crazy acrophobic notion that I was looking down rather than up, and the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands tingled, like an ape's must when, releasing one high branch to seize another, he discovers that there isn't another.

And I immediately thought of Dubhe in Donnerjack, to whom this had happened.

I don't really care what Whitey is doing, but I am interested in why he does it.

"Mountain," I said.  "Mountain, you have told me to go away."

There was a rumble.

"But I cannot," I said, and I took a drink.

"I'm bringing you the best in the business," I said, "to go up on your slopes and to stand beneath the stars in your highest places.  I must do this thing because you are there.  No other reason.  Nothing personal...."

After a time, I said, "That's not true."

"I am a man," I said, "and I need to break mountains to prove that I will not die even though I will die.  I am less than I want to be, Sister, and you can make me more.  So I guess it is personal."

And a little later:

"There is a certain madness involved," I said, "a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have.  Each mountain is a deity, you know.  Each is an immortal power.  If you make sacrifices upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace, and for a time you will share this power.  Perhaps that is why they call me...."

While climbing the mountain, Whitey and his crew are warned by a possibly supernatural manifestation that they should turn back. I couldn't help but think of the nonsense words at the beginning of ELO's  Fire on High, which if played backwards say "The music is reversible but time is not. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back." They persevere and find something entirely unexpected, but fits in very neatly with a reference hidden early in the story.

While I wasn't all that captivated by the literal story, the mountain as a metaphor really works for me. Jack wishes to become more than he is. He climbs the Gray Sister because it's there. That's a universal goal and Zelazny speaks compellingly of it here.